Engineering / Technical Program Management Leadership (Revision) Concepts

🧠 Strategic & Visionary Thinking

Aligning goals:
→ Cascade company OKRs → team goals
→ Quarterly planning + KPIs
→ Cross-functional syncs

Long-term strategy:
→ 3-year roadmap (e.g., modernization)
→ Quarterly phases + measurable milestones
→ Result: +40% availability, –20% cost

Success metrics:
→ Leading: sprint velocity, deployment freq
→ Lagging: NPS, uptime, defect rate
→ TPM-specific: delivery health, stakeholder feedback

👥 People & Org Leadership

Difficult high performer:
→ 1:1s + feedback → mentor pairing
→ Result: improved peer feedback in 2 months

Building teams:
→ Focus: clarity, culture, capability
→ Tools: retros, health checks, clear roles/goals

Leadership style:
→ Context over control
→ Collaborative, adaptive, decisive

🧰 Technical Depth & Judgment

Tech excellence:
→ Culture: code reviews, design docs, postmortems
→ Empower architects; align product timelines for tech investment

Complex project:
→ Monolith → microservices
→ Used flags, dark launches / feature flags, rollback plan
→ Weekly risk reviews

Buy vs. build:
→ Evaluate: core/context, time-to-market, TCO, Extensibility
→ Ex: SaaS → in-house system for scale/integration

📊 Execution & Delivery Focus

Failing program:
→ RACI reset, 2-week re-scope, daily standups
→ Result: MVP in 6 weeks, trust regained

Delivery tracking:
→ Roadmaps, burndowns, weekly reviews
→ Escalate blockers, celebrate wins

Shifting priorities:
→ Over-communicate; RAG dashboard
→ Involve stakeholders in reprioritization

🗣️ Cross-Functional Influence

Influencing w/o authority:
→ Business case + data + industry benchmarks
→ Result: execs approved tech debt work

Conflict resolution:
→ Align on goals, clarify trade-offs
→ Normalize healthy tension, focus on outcomes

Communicating bad news:
→ Be honest, timely, solutions-focused
→ Ex: delay → recovery plan + new timeline

🧬 Culture Fit & Leadership

Psychological safety:
→ Model vulnerability, encourage dissent
→ Surveys → norm updates

Data over opinion:
→ Team wanted to sunset feature
→ Usage data → revamp UX → +25% satisfaction

Accountability:
→ Clear ownership + follow-through
→ Public tracking, blame-free retros